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Radicals: Enigmatic Angela

4 minute read
TIME

Angela in handcuffs remained no less enigmatic than Angela on the lam.

When FBI agents captured Angela Davis in a Manhattan motel last week, it seemed that the denouement of the mystery surrounding the striking, cerebral young radical might be near. Instead, the plot only thickened. Along with Angela, federal agents arrested David Poindexter, a black Chicagoan with known Communist ties. They also introduced another new, if slightly aging, character into the drama—the Communist Party, U.S.A. The result was a baffling mixture of Old Left and New, with Angela the pivotal figure.

Angela was wanted by California authorities for allegedly supplying the guns used by the kidnapers in last summer’s bloody Marin County courthouse shootout (TIME, Aug. 24). A onetime member of the Black Panther Party, she often traveled the state raising money and organizing the defense of the Soledad Three, a trio of blacks accused of killing a California prison guard. A frequent companion, Jonathan Jackson, was a leader in the courthouse kidnap attempt.

Although seemingly more of a black militant than a dialectician, Angela never made a secret of her Communist Party membership. She proclaimed it during her recent assistant professorship in philosophy at U.C.L.A., which led the university’s board of regents to refuse renewal of her contract last year. Still, when Angela disappeared after the courthouse kidnaping, her Communist affiliation appeared unimportant.

Following her capture, however, the FBI alleged that Angela had been aided and sheltered by Communist Party members during her two months as a fugitive. According to FBI reports, Poindexter was introduced to Angela through a Communist contact on the West Coast, and agreed to aid her escape. The FBI also has the two turning up at Poindexter’s Chicago apartment and in Miami. In Chicago and Miami, the FBI says, they received money from the Communist Party apparatus. Last week John Abt, a veteran defender of the Communist Party, announced that he was going to take Angela’s case. Shortly afterward, during a news conference at Communist Party headquarters in Manhattan, General Secretary Gus Hall said proudly, if by then redundantly, that Angela was indeed a party member.

Subdued. Presumably, Angela’s alleged activities would have caused the party acute embarrassment. Last week a top FBI official said that violence and radical activity on campuses across the country are not connected to the Communist Party. And at his press conference, Hall denounced the Weathermen’s fall bombing offensive and said he was sure that Angela “would never engage in violence.”

Angela appeared subdued, almost timid at her arraignment in federal court on charges of unlawful flight to avoid prosecution for murder and kidnaping in California. She was later turned over to New York authorities to await a hearing next month on extradition to California. Says William Kunstler, a defense attorney in the Chicago conspiracy trial: “She now seems to be torn between the old-line theory and her friendship with black people. Remember, her education is all white-oriented—Brandeis, the Sorbonne, Marcuse.” Yet, he adds, “the differences between the party and the movement are irreconcilable. The Communist Party is against the young and their revolutionary activity. She must make a choice.”

Clearly, when she fled, Angela made her first choice. Still, many questions remain unanswered. Why didn’t she leave the country? Why did she go to New York, and once there, why did she fail to go underground in the black community? What role, if any, did the Communist Party play in the Marin County shootout?

In Manhattan, gray-haired Communists, Afroed young blacks and a scattering of long-haired whites demonstrated in Angela’s support, but some of her sympathizers found their heroine a puzzling and tarnished figure. As one white radical with close ties to the Panthers put it: “Maybe she just wasn’t what we thought she was.”

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